Holiday Lights: Incandescent vs. LED

A story from PDXgreen about how the city of Portland’s business association is switching all the downtown Christmas lights from incandecent to LED caught my eye. First, because I swore last year that I would change my house lights (I am sick and tired of trying to figure out which little bulb is burning out) and second, because of the apparently amazing energy saving – the story mentions 80% less energy.

80% LESS ENERGY??? That’s huge!

The story links to an article from Consumer Report which tested a 50 foot string of LED’s against incandescent blubs in three sizes (mini, C7 and C9) with LED’s using 1 to 3 kilowatt hours compared with 12 to 105 kw of hours for the incandescents! Where LED’s were slightly more cost than incandescents, (only slightly) they quickly paid back in the energy savings.

The best part? The LED bulbs were still working after 4,000 plus hours, where each string of incandescents had one or more bulbs burn out before 2,000 hours. You can read the full report here but the bottom line is: they don’t cost much more (if anything), they run cooler, reducing fire risk, and last longer.

The Portland downtown business owners paid $180,000 for the new LED lights, but expect to recoup $100,000 of it from a state business tax credit for energy – efficient improvements. I’m going to see if I can find out if Washington State has this type of tax credit available and also which group locally are using these types of lights (a trip to the Downtown Seattle Association website indicates that at least some of their lights are LED’s.)

And what did Portland do with the 22,000 strands of incandescent lights? Recycled them of course!